Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
A sickening familiarity hung over it all. I remembered Dennis, in the briefing room in
Chernobyl, tapping his pointer on the image of the firemen's memorial. I saw his contam-
ination map of the Exclusion Zone, a distorted starfish with a reactor at its heart. And now
again. Another terrifying Eden erupting onto the landscape. Another fifty or hundred thou-
sand people forced aside. Another ghost born to haunt the world.
It was a noisy camp. The generator ran all night, and the sadhus, too, working in shifts to
ensure no break in the cymbal tinkling and the
Hare Hare-
ing. Underlying it all was a low
murmur of conversation that I eventually realized was a recording of Shri Baba giving a
sermon. Mahesh, the young man with the laptop and the webcam, also had an MP3 player
with external speakers. The first thing he did upon reaching camp every afternoon was to
connect the speakers to the generator and start Shri Baba up. I came to find it almost com-
forting, this never-ending sermon, a low lullaby beckoning me into sleep against the hard,
uneven ground.
Five in the morning again, and we woke up, Mansi and I each in our individual mesh
pods of mosquito netting. For Mansi, the mosquito net served double duty as a sadhu net.
We didn't put it past Creepy Baba or some other insufficiently detached holy man to come
climbing in next to her, hoping to play Krishna to her Radha.
It was Mansi's last morning on the yatra. She had things to do back in Delhi. When she
announced that she would be leaving, though, Creepy Baba had suddenly announced that
he, too, needed to go to Delhi.
Oh god, Mansi said. I'll never get rid of him.
I emerged to the sight of the pre-dawn mortifications. There was always a sadhu bal-
anced on his head in the tent across the way, or complicating his nostrils with yogic breath-
ing, or inflicting himself with some other reverent difficulty. Somehow it always took me
by surprise. When I leave a tent, I guess I'm expecting a campfire, or some beef jerky—not
a holy man tied in a square knot.
More substantially, I wondered why there weren't any young environmental types kick-
ing around. Where were the young green-niks of Delhi and Agra? R. C. Trivedi and Bharat
Lal Seth had both suggested that secular environmentalists and Hindu spiritual groups were
finally working together, after decades of pointless division. I had thought India was the
place where someone was finally building the bridge between conservation and religion.
And maybe so. But then where was everybody?
Mansi made her escape shortly after we started walking, hitching a ride to the bus station
in Sunil's jeep. For a moment it looked like she would get away without Creepy Baba in
